of the intruder, then he passed
away, let himself be blown away, as it were, across the lagoon,
wheeled, circled, and passed out to sea.

Dick approached the place he knew, and there lay the little old barrel
all warped by the powerful sun; the staves stood apart, and the hooping
was rusted and broken, and whatever it had contained in the way of
spirit and conviviality had long ago drained away.

Beside the barrel lay a skeleton, round which lay a few rags of cloth.
The skull had fallen to one side, and the lower jaw had fallen from the
skull; the bones of the hands and feet were still articulated, and the
ribs had not fallen in. It was all white and bleached, and the sun
shone on it as indifferently as on the coral, this shell and framework
that had once been a man. There was nothing dreadful about it, but a
whole world of wonder.

To Dick, who had not been broken into the idea of death, who had not
learned to associate it with graves and funerals, sorrow, eternity, and
hell, the thing spoke as it never could have spoken to you or me.

Looking at it, things linked themselves together in his mind: the
skeletons of birds he had found in the woods, the fish he had slain,
even trees lying dead and rotten--even the shells of crabs.

If you had asked him what lay before him, and if he could have
expressed the thought in his mind, he would have answered you "change."

All the philosophy in the world could not have told him more than he
knew just then about death--he, who even did not know its name.

He was held spellbound by the marvel and miracle of the thing and the
thoughts that suddenly crowded his mind like a host of spectres for
whom a door has just been opened.

Just as a child by unanswerable logic knows that a fire which has
burned him once will burn him again, or will burn another person, he
knew that just as the form before him was, his form would be some
day--and Emmeline's.

Then came the vague question which is born not of the brain, but the
heart, and which is the basis of all religions--where shall I be then?
His mind was not of an introspective nature, and the question just
strayed across it and was gone. And still the wonder of the thing held
him. He was for the first time in his life in a reverie; the corpse
that had shocked and terrified him five years ago had cast seeds of
thought with its dead fingers upon his mind, the skeleton had brought
them to maturity. The full fact of universal death sud